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Mar 24, 2016 at 11:18 PMMar 25, 2016 at 12:19 AM

The landfill at Lakeland Electric's McIntosh Power Plant cannot be protected against sinkholes, a liability of catastrophic proportions to Polk County and its water supply, anti-coal advocates warned the utility in a new analysis.

LAKELAND — The landfill at Lakeland Electric's McIntosh Power Plant cannot be protected against sinkholes, a liability of catastrophic proportions to Polk County and its water supply, anti-coal advocates warned the utility in a new analysis.

And since the hill — the utility's disposal pile for coal ash — cannot be made safe, Lakeland Electric should close the coal-burning Unit 3 rather than attempt to meet new environmental rules that will force the issue, representatives from the Sierra Club and its Beyond Coal campaign said.

Engineers and managers at Lakeland Electric have their doubts the situation is so severe.

The utility will hire its own consultant to analyze the site to meet the two new regulations, but initially, "I am not seeing these heavy compliance costs," said Steve Marshall, the utility's manager of production engineering.

The utility may also dispute that its landfill is a permanent storage site — a distinction in the federal rule — as it markets and sells its coal combustion byproducts.

If the landfill is considered a permanent storage location, it would be subject to more stringent rules.

And if so, it won't be able to make grade, a researcher commissioned by the Sierra Club said.

The plant lies "in one of the county's most unstable areas," wrote Mark Stewart, a professor emeritus of geology with publications on sink holes, water resources management and hydrogeology.

"The Facilities were not built to withstand the influence of sinkholes," he continued. "They lack the structural reinforcement that would be necessary, but may not even be sufficient, to prevent a sudden foundation collapse."

The Sierra Club commissioned Stewart to research the issue and provide an analysis in connection with one of two upcoming changes in federal environmental rules.

There are two recognized sinkholes on the McIntosh property — Fish Lake and Lake D — Stewart wrote, and two suspected sinkholes nearby. Citing a statistical study of sinkhole probabilities in Florida, this makes McIntosh 6 ½ times more likely to develop additional sinkholes than the state at large.

The federal rules also dictate the coal ash hill has adequate separation from the upper aquifer to mitigate any leakage. It won't be able to meet those requirements, Stewart wrote.

And further: "The Facilities cannot be retrofitted now to be safe." Attempting to do so could trigger a collapse of the pile, potentially contaminating groundwater.

LE: Good now, good later

The Sierra Club's report also claims the landfill is leaching toxic compounds into the groundwater, but utility officials dispute that claim as well.

"This is the standard, and we're below it," Marshall said. "It's as clear as it could be.

"If the things we were doing were not right, the Department of Environmental Protection would be all over us. There is oversight — we are very much watched."

Groundwater entering below the McIntosh Power Plant property generally comes from the northeast corner, where a battery of three test wells are set up to measure mineral and contaminant content.

Three other wells on the southeastern corner of the property measure the outflow to compare against the inflow.

If the plant was causing groundwater contamination, it would be reflected in the test data, said Doug Doerr, Lakeland Electric's manager of environmental testing and regulations. As such, there is no evidence the plant's coal ash storage and processing procedures are causing contamination.

Under the new federal rules, Lakeland Electric will need to add test wells to monitor groundwater around the coal ash disposal sites, not just the boundaries of the plant.

But the price of meeting the regulations will be "nowhere near" an amount that would force Lakeland Electric to close McIntosh Unit 3 on its own, Marshall said.

Instead, "the threat to unit three is truly the Clean Power Plan. I don't think we can achieve our carbon dioxide guidelines. There is no cost-effective technical solution."

If the Clean Power Plan goes into effect — the U.S. Supreme Court recently delayed implementation until a lower appeals court decides a lawsuit filed by 25 states against the EPA — Lakeland Electric expects to close Unit 3 by the mid-2020s.

But "between now and then, it's too soon to give up the ship," Marshall said.

Regulation follows tragedy

The EPA's updated coal ash rules were set into motion after the 1.1 billion gallon spill of fly ash slurry from the Tennessee Valley Authority's Kington Fossil Plant in Kingston, Tenn., in 2008, the largest such spill in history. The spill entered the Emory and Clinch rivers, covered about 300 acres of land and killed vast amounts of wildlife.

The first rule, the "CCR rule," will require utilities to more closely control the disposal of "coal combustion residuals," or coal ash. The second puts stricter limits on pollutants carried by water used during the production of electricity in coal-fueled generators, the Effluent Limitation Guidelines, or ELG rule.

Coal is not a uniform substance and has significant differences in grade and composition, depending on its source. But coal can contain amounts of heavy metals like molybdenum, chromium, lead and mercury that can be harmful to humans and other life in small amounts.

Coal ash can easily enter the water supply if not correctly cordoned, the EPA said describing the reason for increasing regulations on its disposal.

The EPA's stated purpose for rules is to limit the risk to the public and its water supplies from potentially catastrophic failures of coal ash containment vessels and storage sites. Some elements of the rule have already taken effect, like requirements to make containment plans and inspection reports publicly available.

Under the CCR rule, if Lakeland Electric can not prove its coal ash containment site meets the requirements by Oct. 17, 2018, it could be forced to close it.

If Lakeland Electric had to close its disposal site, pay for removal and ship newly created byproducts to a disposal facility, Unit 3 would no longer be financially viable, Lakeland Electric General Manager Joel Ivy said. But that's not the expected outcome.

His staff members said they think the disposal site will meet the federal regulations.

"We are pleased to report that McIntosh Unit 3 complies with the existing requirements of the CCR and ELG rules. We are also preparing to comply with all future requirements of these rules that are applicable to Lakeland Electric's operation of Unit 3, and we are studying these issues carefully," Ivy wrote to the Sierra Club.

The Sierra Club's report makes comparisons to the collapse of a phosphogypsum stack outside Mulberry in 1994. A sinkhole developed underneath the 220-foot stack and dumped 4 million cubic feet of waste gypsum and highly acidic wastewater stored on top into the Floridan aquifer.

It's a mistake to compare the dry-storage landfill at McIntosh with the wet-storage ponds on top of gypsum stacks created from phosphorus mining, Doerr said.

The phosphogypsum created as a byproduct of fertilizer manufacturing is different from the gypsum created from Unit 3's byproducts. It is not radioactive or acidic, Doerr said.

Also, Lakeland's landfill does not have wastewater ponds filled with acidic slurry.

The industrial waste market

The wind was blowing hard on top of the coal ash hill — a mass of coal ash compounds and fill dirt — on the east side of the McIntosh Power Plant property as a water-spraying truck made its way up the temporary road to keep the exposed edges damp so dust would not fly everywhere.

Below, a front loader managed separate piles of gypsum and fly ash. With each scoop taken at the pale gypsum pile, barely visible wisps of dust caught the wind and dispersed.

Now, the utility is required to keep dust on the property. The new rules will require closer control of this kind of "fugitive dust." The red line will no longer be at the utility's property borders, but the immediate containment area.

The three byproducts — known collectively as coal ash — are:

- Fly ash, the cinders that rise with heat. A fine, powdery byproduct, fly ash is commonly used in the production of Portland cement.

- Bottom ash, which falls into the bottom of the generator onto an underwater conveyor. Coarser than fly ash, it is often used as filling material during road construction.

- Gypsum, created by combining sulfur compounds removed from plant emissions, an environmental control, with water and limestone to create a marketable product. Gypsum of the type created by Lakeland Electric is used in wallboard and plaster, for example.

Before 2006, Lakeland Electric was storing all of its byproducts in the hill by combining it with quicklime to create a concrete-like substance called a pozzolanic material. Now, the utility sells all of its bottom ash and fly ash and only unsold gypsum is added to the hill.

As the construction industry picked up, so has its demand for the byproducts of burning coal. About 40 to 50 truckloads of the stuff leaves McIntosh Power Plant each day, Plant Manager Ron Kremann said.

The utility told the Florida Department of Environmental Protection it expects to sell all its gypsum by the end of 2016.

Lakeland Electric aggressively markets the material, Kremann said. The sales are not very profitable, but the primary benefit is getting rid of it.

There's also less of it in recent years as the price of natural gas has hit historic lows and Unit 5, the utility's 340-megawatt combined-cycle gas burner, has generated a large majority of Lakeland Electric's power.

About a decade ago, the utility commissioned work to see whether it could make the landfill higher. It could, but it also added equipment to its generator that would allow the utility to create the industrially useful byproducts, Marshall said.

With that "we greatly reduced the infill to the landfill," Marshall said.

The long-term challenge faced by the coal ash sales program is not containment, but competition and market demand, he added.

Plant under fire

Lakeland Electric rejected an earlier analysis commissioned by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy that argued the 365-megawatt, coal-fired Unit 3 generator was a financial loser in the short term and should be closed before federal regulations would force it to in the 2020s.

Although it may not make sense to spend several 10s of millions of dollars on Unit 3, the plant still has useful life and the utility is still paying off debt on the generator and equipment added over the years and after a major nine-month failure in 2014, had proven itself reliable again, Ivy said.

But coal is on the way out, Ivy told the commission recently, and in the coming years the utility and the city commission will need to make difficult decisions about the utility's future for electricity production.

"I think we get it, I think we want to be full stewards (of the environment), but we want to make sure we take full advantage of the life of this assets," he told The Ledger.

In the EPA's carbon dioxide-limiting Clean Power Plan, coal-fired power plants like McIntosh Unit 3 face an extinguishing force.

The regulation hit a roadblock last month when the Supreme Court delayed implementation of the rule until the lower appeals court settles a lawsuit filed by West Virginia and 24 other states, including Florida, against the EPA — a rare turn for the highest court.

The coal ash rules, in comparison, have not generated that sort of dread for the power producers. They, too, are being challenged in court and in Congress.

Ultimately, it may not be the coal ash rules or the Clean Power Plan that forces the utility to shut down Unit 3, but a combination of maintenance, fuel prices, and safety fixes that make the final years of operations exceedingly expensive.

A week ago, engineers determined the plant was built 34 years ago with a major safety flaw: bad math that could cause circuit breaking equipment to dramatically and dangerously fail in the case of a major overload.

The plant is in a scheduled outage, but whether it starts back up later this year will depend on finding an economical fix for the plant.

Short-term fixes and changes to production processes to keep workers away from faulty fail safe devices could get the plant active again in April, as planned. Ivy expects to have identified a permanent fix by fall.

But in the meantime, the city and utility's finance teams and engineers will need to figure out if the coal ash compliance costs and the cost to make the plant safe for workers are worth 10 to 15 years of productive life, especially as natural gas prices have relegated Unit 3 to a minor role in the utility's electricity production portfolio.

The case is clear, according to Kelly Martin and Diana Csank, Sierra Club representatives who wrote to Ivy calling for the closure of the generator.

"For the economic, regulatory, and public health reasons discussed below and in Dr. Stewart's assessment, we urge Lakeland Electric to cease burning coal and thereby cease producing harmful waste," they wrote. "We also urge Lakeland Electric to clean up the (coal ash) that has accumulated at McIntosh. The resulting cost savings to the utility and its customers can add up to many millions of dollars. Moreover, the public health benefits could be even more significant because, under the status quo, Unit 3's waste threatens invaluable public drinking water supplies."

SATURDAY: Sierra Club investigation shows mercury levels misread.

— Christopher Guinn can be reached at Christopher.Guinn@theledger.com or 863-802-7592. Follow him on Twitter @CGuinnNews.

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